


Cartographers After the War

by thought



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 15:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3535274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The heat of Chorus summers is overwhelming and inescapable. Sort of like emotions, apparently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cartographers After the War

Vanessa takes her to bed like a general leading her troops to victory, touches her like a reliable, familiar weapon, like she has mapped these paths a hundred times before. There is something like fear in her eyes, something like six thousand feet above the surface without a parachute, but her hands on Carolina's wrist are hard and her hands in Carolina's hair are gentle and her smile speaks a level of affection so deep that Carolina has to close her eyes to get away.

Vanessa says, "will you touch yourself?" and Carolina remembers--

Connie standing behind a chair in the conference room, small hand wrapped around the back of Tex's neck. The slow tilt of chin towards chest, the tension that fell away from hunched shoulders. Carolina remembers not knowing who she was more jealous of.

Vanessa watches her and watches her until it stops being a performance. Carolina does not know how to stop trying to be perfect, but thinks maybe the way Vanessas eyes on her face and hands on her shoulders feel like Anchors instead of judgment is a place to start. Afterwards, Vanessa doesn't leave. Carolina watches her, still in underwear and a tank top, disappearing just long enough to get a glass of water from the tap while Carolina sprawls across warm sheets, sweat lying hot against her skin in the nighttime heat. Twenty seconds can last an eternity. It's very easy, now, to pretend they don't. Vanessa comes back and Carolina tells herself she isnt surprised.

She wakes up the next morning and the sunlight through the dirty window is hot on her eyelids. She can hear Vanessa moving in the other room, and the rush of traffic outside, and the footsteps of people overhead. Her head aches dully and the sheets stick to her legs when she kicks them aside in hopes of cooler air. Summer is long and relentless and drapes her in reminders of the place she grew up until she feels like shes going to be trapped in the strung-out helplessness of her childhood forever.

The air is damp and heavy on her skin and in her chest. She thinks probably this is what crying is like when your body has forgotten how, breaths thick and skin always too hot and the whole world a little blurry at the edges.

She goes outside into the still air and runs and runs until she's weak and dizzy but she never breaks the surface. Comes back to the empty apartment and drinks two cups of coffee very fast, one after the other, and then sits on the floor of the shower under cold water until she can't feel anything but the buzzing in her head and the memory of York holding two cups of coffee and saying Im drinking for two, even while Delta warned him about caffeine addiction and tried to act like he wasnt charmed.

Late morning drags its feet through the heat haze over murky rainwater puddles on cracked blacktop, dawdles around stale coffeepots and the listless call of birds and children gone lethargic with the heat. Eventually Carolina walks to the office and it takes a decade, a lifetime, twenty minutes of dreaming. She goes from numb to dissociative, wonders at the legs that still carry her and the arms that still move and the skin that shows no indication that things have changed. The body doesn't understand. Put any body with another body and maybe you've got intimacy of some sort or another, maybe the coming together of skin and flesh and bones is symbolic in a way, but she knows that the physicality isn't the remarkable part. She thinks the physical parts have been inevitable since the third day they knew each other. But the emotions are a sneak attack, a monster under the bed wrapped in cliches and trauma and tasting more and more like an unfamiliar concept of home with every kiss.

Carolina gets to the office. She takes Vanessa a folder of paperwork, and then she takes Vanessa out for coffee, and then she takes two bullets in the shoulder. Meant for Vanessa. Obviously. The dangerous attackers have never come after Carolina with guns.

She passes out before the medics arrive, and when she comes to it's in a hospital bed and Vanessa's head is bowed, forehead pressed to the starched white sheets like seeking penance from the gods she doesn't believe in. Carolina puts a hand on Vanessas back and its shaking with the same fine tremmers as the day that Doyle appeared on the news standing drenched in rain on the steps of the temple in city centre, reassuring the citizens that the government was working as quickly as it could to restore order and normality. Carolina had wondered aloud if wash had tried to convince him to recite any knock knock jokes yet, but Vanessa had just shaken her head, frustrated.

He learned his English during university, shed said. You can always tell from the accent who learned it off the language acquisition programs.

Carolinas shoulder burns, painkillers already wearing off. She wiggles her fingers experimentally. Her throat is scratchy and sore but she doesnt want to disturb Vanessa before shes ready. Carolina remembers white armour stained with blood, remembers shredded vocal chords and the endless nights of unsteady beeping and rattling breaths. She knows there's nothing she can say to make the guilt and self-recrimination fade any faster, knows, if shes being truthful, that they never really fade, but she presses a hand to Vanessa's cheek so she can feel the warmth of blood still flowing under skin.

Vanessa raises her head after a while, and her eyes are red and very tired. "I'm not worth this," she says.

Carolina can hear the machines at the head of her bed beeping in time with the rain against the window. "What you represent is," she says.

She remembers standing dripping blood on the floor while The Director outlined all the ways she was not good enough. Remembers the scar that ran all the way down Wyoming's spine and the way he'd laughed when explaining, Father dearest threw me into a rather expensive stained glass window as a sixteenth birthday gift, and the way none of them had even blinked. Remembers York and Florida and the way their childhood stories were always desperately, carefully idyllic.

She takes Vanessas fingers and wraps them around her wrist, pressing fingertips right over her pulse point-- proof of life. And youre worth it to me. She doesnt say the choice to step in the way of the bullets is worth equally as much because she is already stripped of enough armour, but the way Vanessa doesnt argue makes her think she already knows.


End file.
